(WatchDogReport.org) – Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard has said that well-trained Chilean “ninjas” are burglarizing wealthy residents in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan.
According to the sheriff, the migrants used the Visa Waiver Program to enter the U.S. Bouchard described the burglars as highly organized and “masked up,” noting that each individual had a backpack containing a specific set of tools when carrying out burglaries. The sheriff’s comments in an interview with FOX 2 Detroit highlighted the increase in foreign gangs from Latin America operating across the U.S., including the Detroit suburbs, where the burglars are targeting wealthy households for cash, designer handbags, and jewelry.
The “high-end burglary” crisis has reached such a point that a task force has been created to clamp down on the transnational gangs at the root of the organized burglaries. The thieves carry equipment that is capable of jamming security alarms. Bouchard described the gang as highly methodical and also stated that they were using trackers on cars and trail cameras to determine when residents would be at home.
The gang of burglars – who are mainly from Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru – was filmed by CCTV cameras stealing $800,000 worth of cash and jewelry. This was not the first time the neighborhood had been attacked by the thieves, who returned to take advantage of the design of the “large upscale homes,” which, as the sheriff commented, were “empty” and backing onto areas with very little or no observation from neighbors. The Los Angeles Police Department set up a task force in March 2024 to deal with the influx of “burglary tourists” linked to 30 robberies across Southern California who arrived from these countries on 90-day visas to burglarize rich mansions before fleeing back to South America.
Bouchard said that all the intelligence linked the gang to Chile and that they had over 100 teams operating in America. The gangs take advantage of the VWP, which allows them to bypass the need for a visa to get into the country. Bouchard called on Washington D.C. lawmakers to remove Chile from the VWP. In the 2022 fiscal year, almost 85,000 immigrants who entered the U.S. on the VWP overstayed their allotted 90 days.
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